I am really happy to be listed among the contributors, and I think Atom
is a great improvement over RSS2.0. I am not yet sure how much of an
improvement it is over RSS1.0, as I don't know
the RSS1.0 standard in enough detail to be able to comment. The main
advantage that RSS1.0 still has over Atom is that, being built on RDF,
it has a very clear and solid extensibility framework. (That RSS1.0
needed some improvement is in part visible by the fact that an RSS1.1 draft spec has been
delivered recently) Atom could have become clearly and unequivocally a
better standard than RSS1.0 had it been possible to tweak it just a
little bit to make it RDF compatible. The case for the extensibility
advantages of RDF were very clearly made by Dan Brickley in an email
to the atom mailing list a year ago, on the 18 August 2004. But as
the rest of the thread shows some people found it very difficult to
understand this point. There is clearly a lot of learning by experience
the hard way that is going to take place before Dan's points are well
understood and assimilated.

What Atom has now clearly achieved though is to add clarity to every
other aspect of syndication. Work on the RDF side of things is
continuing on on the atom-owl
mailing list which will hopefully help provide a standard ontology for
the atom format.

And by the way, BlogEd (when publishing to a simple web server using ftp
such as my personal blog),
now publishes an Atom 1.0 feed.